To be fair, this happens a lot in laptop GPUs. Heck nVidia's 600M series has a bunch of Fermi parts in it. Some of them high end ones. It is just easier to get away with it because people don't expect laptop GPUs to be the same as desktop.

And those OEM's are going to be selling them as AMD advertises them to consumers, which is going to create confusion and possibly people getting scammed on sites such as eBay. Technically it's an 8970, did I forget to mention it's an OEM version? *trollface*

I'm still pretty certain Nvidia is going to rebrand mid/top-end 6xx series GPU's as low/mid 7xx series GPU's, but as long as the performance isn't misleading (e.g. rebranding a GK104 as a 780 then releasing like a GK110 as a 775 that performs better or something) I am fine with it.

Still, it's not affecting us apart from needing to wait for the 9XXX series which is good if they take the time to really get a good jump from the 7XXX series

AMD will make more money because of this so its a good move for them, when they did renaming before it didn't hurt them. AMD with more money = better for us the consumers since AMD can remain more competitive and still alive

Still, it's not affecting us apart from needing to wait for the 9XXX series which is good if they take the time to really get a good jump from the 7XXX series

AMD will make more money because of this so its a good move for them, when they did renaming before it didn't hurt them. AMD with more money = better for us the consumers since AMD can remain more competitive and still alive

I guess he is referring to the fact that we have very powerful GPUs but not a whole lot to push it, which many blame on the console stagnation.

You might see things that will put a hurt on your high-end GPUs, but this is primarily due to intensive particle effects that don't add a whole lot to the experience. A good example of this is Metro 2033. (great game though)

Unreal and Source engines do a great job while maintaining wide playability, while engines like Frostbite are tough to run, but look great with effects not often found in other engines.

Edit: this makes me wonder if my 6850m is actually a 5850m, ill have to check that.

The OEM version of the GTX660 being weaker is arguable, the clocks are lower, but it has more shaders, and while the memory bandwidth seems higher on the retail GTX660, because of its memory configuration 512MB of the memory has to share its memory bandwidth.

I didn't realize this many TPUer's used Pre-Built OEM's... I don't see anything wrong with this a 7970 is still plenty fast for any normal user and someone thats going to be buying Pre-Built will not be buying a whole new computer just to upgrade the GPU.

And that makes it ok?
It's not like the OEM market is insignificant - if it was, AMD wouldn't be doing business in it. And I for one wouldn't enjoy being screwed over just because I wanted to buy a Lenovo or a Dell. This will hurt sales, and it is a crappy move, no matter how you look at it.

How will this hurt sales? When the people who buy the vast majority of these rigs configure them on Dell or Lenovo's or HP's site or see them in the local bestbuy and one has an 8950 in it the highest number card sold do you really think they are going to spend hours researching if that is a rebranded card or blindly purchase it? Do you really think for a second the people purchasing a PREBUILT PC give two flying hoots what rebrands in their PC as long as it is the fastest sold? No one is telling you to run out and spend 3 times as much as the hardware is worth for a prebuilt, but people buy them and right now the 8950 sounds like the fastest card out there.

Why do you think OEM's have terrible graphics cards with 4GB of onboard ram? Do you really think a GT620 can use 4GB of ram? On a spec sheet that looks great just like the 16GB of slow as heck ram they stuffed in next to it. OEM prebuilts are a numbers game and big numbers sell. Move on. You can get your panties in a wad all you want, but you are never going to stop it.